Negative Pleasures

Negative pleasures seem to be the pleasures of old age, but then I think back...and then I’m not so sure. Anyway, what am I talking about? I’m talking about the absence of stress. But absence of stress is equivalent to an absence of stimulus. And if one is quite readily stimulated, the absence of stimulus is in itself a pleasure.

Reading Berdyaev’s The Beginning and End again after a long stretch of years, I find him speaking of the passionate life. He doesn’t mean the life of the flesh, but nevertheless he is much taken with “passion” and with “dynamism.” At one point he is exploring the German mystic Boehme’s writings about the Ungrund. That is a kind of Nothingness out of which God creates. Berdyaev is also influenced by Hegel—not enough to agree with Hegel that God is evolving in history, but the dynamic view in Hegel appeals to him.

Now reading quotes from Boehme in that book (not included in the compilation that I own, perhaps because of their seemingly heterodox flavor) it occurred to me that Boehme’s inward experiences are ultimately the same as other “unitive” experiences of great mystics. In these there is some kind of experience of the rootings of the self but projected onto God (in my view). The mystics experience energy and take it to be God. But it might very well be the life-force that they feel. Boehme looked deeper than most and hence experienced Nothingness and, arising out of it, a powerful desire. But that may be the experience of an origination, not an experience of God or of God feeling desires; or it may be an apperception of his own fallen state—and the desire to escape it.

The object of that desire I see as something Berdyaev may have viewed as a passive sort of state. I call it sovereignty—the state in which I am above passion taken positively (a drive) or negatively (a suffering).

If stimulus is associated with life in the physical realm then its absence enables us to experience what lies above that realm. That absence frees the attention. Something of value may “flow down” from above; and if we perceive it, we will cultivate the “negative pleasure” in order to enable ourselves to capture it.

An observation that seems to come to all explorers of the Borderzone is that feelings common in bodily life have a two-tiered character. There is pleasure and then there’s joy, for instance. There is eros and then caritas. There is grasp and there is understanding. There is stimulus and there is intuition. The second in these pairings is always more subtle. Berdyaev’s book, referred to above, is filled with such distinctions, although not presented systematically. There is being and non-being in his own philosophy, for instance, and it is non-being which gets the favorable nod. The state of “being” is the fallen state. Words, words, words. Why not just say “the spiritual.” That nothingness, that negativity, is actually a much higher and very real value. And the negative pleasures are higher values that become accessible when a kind of equilibrium between the lower and higher is achieved—the state of “sovereignty.”

There would seems to be a big difference between this dimension and the one where we are going—but yet it will be a familiar sort of place. Things here will correspond to things there—but what a difference. We can experience that difference by contemplating the difference between stimuli and intuitions. Here everything is mixed up and it is tough to sort things out.